“Why doesn’t Scout interact with your parents’ dogs?” is the most common question I get asked every time we visit my hometown.
I’ll share our heeler and my parents’ husky and doodle coexisting inside the house, playing with us out in the yard at the same time, going on neutral neighborhood walks… but never actually engaging with each other.
Here’s why direct interaction isn’t a priority for us!
Background context and related reading
The cast of characters:
- Scout: Our blue heeler. I’ve written about Scout’s fear-based dog reactivity at length before, along with my feelings about her having or not having dog friends.
- Snort: My family’s husky (and the first dog who really got me interested in the training and responsible ownership worlds).
- Margo: My mom’s certified therapy dog who works in a nontraditional high school with her.
Previous writing about our decision making
I’ve spent quite a bit of time on risk assessments, cost-benefit analyses, and marginal returns in dog training. The below Instagram post sums up my standard risk thought process!
Specific considerations visiting my family dogs
For the question of “should I push Scout and my parents’ dogs to interact with each other?” a few key things come into play.
Frequency of our visits to my parents’ house
While Scout’s been to my parents’ with us more since we moved into our van (before that it was maybe once a year) we still don’t spend a ton of time in my hometown. This:
- makes integration harder because we don’t have long uninterrupted intervals together and
- means it’s really not a big deal to separate the dogs when we are around.
If we lived with my parents full time or visited for lengthy stretches every few weeks? Our priorities would probably be different.
Focus of our time with family
I love including Scout in my life. (I hope that is very, very obvious from this website.) But our cattle dog is with me and Sean almost 24/7… and we don’t see my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and niece nearly that much.
When we’re home, we focus most on quality human time together. Sometimes that means not wanting to worry about the dogs — opting for management rather than training (more on that distinction in the below Instagram post). And that’s okay!
My own emotional attachment to everyone involved
I’ve long struggled with a balance of honoring my emotions without letting them dictate my whole life. (If you’ve been in the dog training world a while, you know this can be a veeery hot topic.)
I’m comfortable acknowledging that I care way too much about Scout and my parents’ dogs to have something go wrong — even if the chance of a truly horrible result is slim. They’re my favorite creatures on the planet. I just don’t want to risk it.
How great the current status quo is
The first few times I brought Scout around my family dogs were capital-A Awful. As in they could not be within view of each other at all, struggled even when just hearing each other through physical barriers, and required constant management to go on a parallel walk.
Nowadays? It’s simple for Scout and Margo to coexist in pretty close proximity. Snort’s less reliable in tight situations, but she can comfortably see my cattle dog without losing her head (and vice versa). I am so happy with everyone’s ability to be neutral and don’t feel pressure to mess with this good status quo.
Don’t fix it if it’s not broken, you know? (See also: Why I’m okay if we never make any more reactivity progress.)
Risk assessment summary for family dog-dog interactions
- The probability of something going wrong if we pushed the dogs to interact is pretty low… but definitely not zero. Scout is nervous and not interested in rough housing. Snort is quite socially awkward herself and has struggled reading to other dogs’ cues in the past. Margo is the most solid of the three but loves to play hard. While I don’t think our cattle dog would start an altercation with intent to do harm, the mix of personalities could still be a recipe for conflict.
- The impact of something going wrong is pretty much intolerable for me. Even if no lasting physical damage resulted from a bad moment, I know myself well enough to understand that I’d have a really hard time recovering emotionally. (And that would only hurt the dogs in the long run, too.)
- The effort and opportunity cost to avoid most risks with Scout and my family dogs is low. It’s no big deal to separate them for most of our short visits! And when we do want to hang out in the same space, we have the skills and management techniques to make it possible without real hassle.
Ultimate decision… there’s no reason everyone needs to interact with each other. Passive coexistence and separate one-on-one fulfillment work wonderfully!
